THE COMMON CORE

Curriculum Standards point educators toward rigorous or deep learning so that students will become “college and career ready.” College-ready students engage with text in thoughtful ways so that they arrive at insights through interpretation, discussion, and analysis. One reading anchor standard of relevance for school librarians comes under the heading “Integration of Knowledge and Ideas.” The anchor standard calls for students at all grade levels to “Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.” This anchor standard invites the school librarian to collaborate with teachers in developing and teaching sets of texts for students to read and compare. This is an opportunity for school librarians to apply their expertise and knowledge of literature—fiction and informational, print and digital.

CONCEPTUAL TEXT SETS

Text sets are collections of texts (print and digital) grouped around a common element (Opitz 1998). They provide multiple perspectives on complex issues (Crawford and Zygouris-Coe 2008). Central to the text set is the big unifying idea. To meet the expectation of the Common Core for deep learning, this core idea is considered conceptual. A concept has several important attributes:

• A concept is an abstract idea. Learning in the abstract is inherently more rigorous; students cannot feel or touch abstract ideas; they must analyze examples and conclude how they fit together under the conceptual umbrella. Young children may read a story about a family with a mother, father, brother, and sister. As they talk about the various family roles, they may begin to think about family as these specific people together. However, in order to arrive at a conceptual understanding of family, they need opportunities to read about all kinds of families and to arrive at insights about what makes a family… is it just the people who make up a family or is it the relationships among those people and their collective relationships to the rest of their universe?
• A concept has complexity in that it may have multiple dimensions or attributes. Each example introduces one or more dimensions of a concept.
• A concept transfers across time and place. For example, the American Revolution is a topic, but revolution is a concept. By studying various revolutionary actions, students can construct understanding of the meaning of revolution… what provokes people to revolt, what the consequences are, where failure can lead to revolt. In this way, students gain insights that not only help them interpret the past but also afford them insights into present and future events.
• A concept is learned through inferential and inductive thinking. Conceptual learning invites the mind to organize facts and examples into ideas. The specific experiences of the Plymouth pilgrims, the potato famine Irish, the Vietnamese boat people, the Mexican field workers come together to yield ideas about immigration.

How can students consider the concept of immigration? Students can arrive at a full meaning of immigration by reading, comparing, and contrasting a variety of carefully selected texts. To be conceptual, these texts need to represent various dimensions of immigration (e.g., reasons for migrating, impact of immigration on the immigrants, challenges encountered, dispositions of immigrants, impact on the destination and the people already inhabiting the destination). For this theme, the following examples might be taught:

• Common Experience: The teacher reads from texts and poses questions to engage students with texts like My Diary from Here to There by Amada Irma Pérez, Quilted Landscapes by Yale Strom, and Emma’s Poem: The Voice of the Statue of Liberty by Linda Glazer.
• Choice Books: Students choose texts; read and discuss with guiding questions focused on what prompted people to leave their homes. What conditions did they find upon arrival? How did they adjust to their new home? What relationships did they maintain with their homeland? What obstacles did they encounter? What contributions have they made to their new homeland? Whole group discussion is organized around comparing and contrasting such texts as The Dragon’s Child: A Story of Angel Island by Laurence Yep, Nory Ryan’s Song by Patricia Reilly Giff, Escaping the Tiger by Laura Manivong, Goodbye, Vietnam by Gloria Whelan, or A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple by Kathryn Lasky. (See the Use This Page link below for a complete list.)

SELECTING TEXTS

Important in the Common Core is text complexity. Here the school librarian’s knowledge of resources is key, because the Common Core asserts that lexile scores alone are not a measure of complexity. The three dimensions of text complexity defined in the Common Core align well with the considerations that librarians have in mind during reader’s advisory transactions. A text set might include titles that differ in these aspects defined in the Common Core:

• Qualitative: First, does the text invite the reader to interpret meaning at multiple levels? Is there literal and figurative meaning? What literary conventions occur in the text? For example, consider the young reader who encounters the convention of tall-tale exaggeration and figurative language in Lester’s John Henry (Dial Books, 1994), “This was no ordinary boulder. It was as hard as anger and so big around, it took half a week for a tall man to walk from one side to the other.” Levels of meaning, structure, language conventionality and clarity, and knowledge demands are qualitative factors that define text complexity.
• Quantitative: Unfortunately, too often educators have only considered quantitative measures. Sentence length, word length, and sentence structure are factors in formulas that rate text quantitatively. The Common Core expectations for text complexity recognize that such quantitative measures represent one, but only one, dimension of complexity.
• Reader and Task: The third dimension for considering text complexity acknowledges that reading is a transaction between reader and task. The reader brings to the task background knowledge, motivation, interest, curiosity, and other dispositions that influence the complexity of the text for him or her. Librarians as reader’s advisors can often relate the story of a child with an intense interest in a topic—cars, dinosaurs, World War II—who could make meaning out of texts that many would consider beyond his/her capacity. Indeed, acknowledgment of this aspect of matching text to reader stands to revitalize the reader advisory role of the librarian.

Selecting texts for text sets must consider these dimensions of text complexity to arrive at a range of texts. Constructing a text set requires considering several criteria:

• A variety based on text complexity considerations. Text sets might include texts that range in complexity, style, or genre, as well as texts for different levels of reading proficiency. For example, a text set that focuses on leadership may include biographies like Yours for Justice, Ida B. Wells by Philip Dray or Eleanor, Quiet No More: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt by Doreen Rappaport as well as a fiction text like Judy Moody Saves the World! by Megan McDonald.
• Differences that offer various approaches to the “big idea” or conceptual understanding that unifies the conceptual text set. A conceptual text set provides specific examples in a variety of contexts. From these specific examples, through discussion, comparison/contrast, analysis, and inductive thinking, students construct conceptual meaning. Concrete topics like pets or Mexico or zoos lack the level of abstraction of a concept. Instead, text sets should center on abstract ideas like family, security, immigration, revolution, or adaptation. These conceptual foci provide context for students to engage in deeper discussion. When young children read a text set related to family as a concept, their questions examine the ways in which people rely on family, the importance of family to a larger social network, and the ways in which family shapes traditions and beliefs. By reading such texts as Henry’s First-Moon Birthday by Lenore Look, Grandpa’s Tractor by Michael Garland, In Our Mothers’ House by Patricia Polacco, and My Two Grandmothers by Effin Older, children can determine what attributes families share in order to understand the concept of family.
• Various cultural perspectives may be appropriate for some concepts, especially those related to social studies. A focus on the concept of civil rights, for example, could include titles that represent various times, cultural groups, and issues. (See the Use This Page link below for a list.)

TEACHING TEXT SETS

ORGANIZING

A text set can be organized for instruction in various ways. For example, a touchstone title may be read in common, and individual students may, then, choose among options for additional reading. Students can be clustered into discussion groups according to the texts they choose, and discussions can follow a literature circle or book discussion protocol. Guiding questions focus students toward consideration of the central concept of the text set. Ultimately, all groups can come together to compare and contrast texts and arrive at insights about the concept.

Alternatively, all students read all books in a text set; this may be a smaller set of books, but each may be so essential that everyone should experience them firsthand. Further, this may be particularly appropriate for younger children to scaffold understanding of the “big idea.” For the concept of mentor, students might read together Eleanor by Barbara Cooney, My Big Brother by Miriam Cohen, Pictures for Miss Josie by Sandra Belton, and Passing the Music Down by Sarah Sullivan. These texts include both biographical texts and fiction; mentor examples are both within and beyond the family. Through guided discussion, students can construct insights about mentors, their impact, and the relationships between mentors and protégés.

QUESTIONING

Teaching conceptually requires constant text-to-text comparison as learners proceed through the set. Questioning needs to maintain focus on the concept and scaffold the comparisons. Text-to-text questions invite students to think about similarities and differences. Examples of questions to invite these comparisons might be:

• What does this remind me of…?
• How is this text similar to…?
• How is this different from…?
• Have I read about something like this before?

Culminating questions are used to ask students to examine the common ground among all the texts. As they do so, they interpret plots, characters, and events. This process of analysis is often facilitated with graphic organizers, especially matrices, Venn diagrams, T-charts, or concept maps. Ideally, the culminating insight is not a simple word, but a sentence. Conversation may begin with “What were all of these books about?” but should proceed to an idea, “What message or idea did these books share?”

THE SCHOOL LIBRARIAN

The Common Core opens the door for school librarians to participate in recommending resources and assisting in the design of their use. By taking the initiative to point to the anchor standard for comparing texts and then proposing text sets from the library collection that suit the conceptual interests of the curriculum, school librarians take an important role in the Common Core and increase the rigor and complexity of learning.

See Use This Page for a list of sample texts.